IRONMAN Mostly Got it Right with New Kona Qualification Method

The IRONMAN World Championship returning to a single-day format in Kona, Hawaii was always going to introduce some pain points. Namely, who should be racing there? The initial backlash on a “mostly proportional” proposal was, well, a return to how qualifying as it once was, meaning that the more people in your age group starting on race day, the more chances you had available to you. Great if you’re a middle-aged man in lycra. Not so great if you’re a woman between 30 and 44 and racing fast, as you might have two slots available to your age group.

IRONMAN under a pre-Andrew Messick regime would have been in “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” mode. (Anybody remember the shocking response to the IRONMAN Passport program and the mea culpa issued by then-CEO Ben Fertic?) From Messick, and now onward to current CEO Scott DeRue, have been focused on introducing customer-centric programs and, more or less, delivering upon them. That’s where things like a transfer and deferral program have come from; actions unheard of in the IRONMAN selling out a full year in advance era.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise to hear that IRONMAN was going to pivot on how it would have athletes qualify for its respective world championships. To recap: we’re effectively introducing a handicap system to triathlon. Every age group is receiving a handicap, based off of performance at the IRONMAN World Championships in Kona by the top 20% within that age group. That figure is then multiplied by your actual time on race day at a given event to create your net time. Those net times are then ranked. Kona slots are first awarded to age group winners (or may roll to the podium within that age group); if those are not taken, they get re-allocated to the remainder pool. The remainder pool slots are then awarded off of net time order until they’re gone.

Naturally, the Slowtwitch Forum has been ablaze with commentary and calculations on this new system. Most reaction is positive; it’s rewarding the fastest athletes, relative to their age group, much in the same way that the Boston Marathon or other time-standardized qualification events do. Those athletes have, in general, not always come from age groups that feature the most population in them. You could have a race with 40 slots available where 12 men and 28 women qualify based on age group winners and net times. Or those numbers could be reversed.

In fewer words: your performance against the entirety of the field now matters, instead of just how many people in your age group show up to start.

This is, for the most part, a good move. For far too long, qualification was simply a matter of “how many of your fellow age groupers ponied up the dollars to start” and finishing well enough within that subset of racers. But, as we’ve seen for years in the most competitive women’s age groups, you could be in the top 10 overall women in the field and not wind up getting a slot because, well, there were just more men between the ages of 35 and 54 who decided to play triathlon that day. That math does not math. Nor does it comport with the current view that the IRONMAN World Championship should be about pure performance. (Let’s leave aside the Collins vision of “leave a slot for the everyday athlete on the pier” for today. That’s another article for another time.)

I think the most glaring miss out of just using top performances in Kona is that it will create courses that will over-index in certain age groups / strengths, and make forum shopping a more likely game than it was before. Take, for instance, a flatter / faster course, such as IRONMAN Florida or Arizona. On those courses there tends to be less of a delta between your overall fastest athletes and those in other age groups. Because of the current math on the handicap, where certain age groups see higher penalties in the heat / humidity / depending on when they start in Kona, you’ll likely see more older athletes earn slots at those events. On the flip side, take one of your more difficult courses, particularly those with more challenging bike courses. It’s likely that they will see more slots go to stronger riding athletes.

On the back of my napkin, I would have looked at creating handicaps that were more course class dependent, and based on results at those particular events, as opposed to solely attempting to create it off of performances in Kona. Say, bucketing races into three separate tiers based on their course characteristics, and then creating your grading system. But I also understand why IRONMAN is basing everything through Kona; first, for ease of the math problem. Secondly, well, branding is a hell of a drug. For better or for worse, Kona is synonymous with IRONMAN.

Now to start playing math to figure out where a mediocre near-40 year old might try to make hay while the sun shines…

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